


Running Lines

by Hadithi



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: F/M, Piece of a bigger story, dorky kissing fic with some drama, soft jock AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:00:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21958507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hadithi/pseuds/Hadithi
Summary: While attending Ocean Town University, Connie and Steven practice running lines. For a romance scene.It goes about as well as you'd expect.
Relationships: Connie Maheswaran/Steven Universe
Comments: 44
Kudos: 339





	Running Lines

**Author's Note:**

> This is for the [Soft Jock AU](https://susoftjockau.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr, where Connie and Steven don't meet until college.

Steven arrived at her dorm after lunch, buzzing with the kind of enthusiasm he usually saved for cheer routines, Crying Breakfast Friends, and his nightmarish food substitutions. Connie had been up since five finishing her homework and memorizing the last few lines they were going to rehearse that day, and her third cup of cold brew was in her shaky hands. Hmm. That’d probably stop once her body processed lunch.

"Go grab the script!" he said cheerfully as she led him into her room.

Connie blinked at him. "How come?"

"So we can read the lines?" He cocked his head. "You can't do that without the script."

She frowned, trying to understand, then giggled and gave his arm a playful push. As always, she might as well have slapped a brick wall. “Oh! I memorized the lines already. You can't really act if you're holding a bunch of papers in front of your face."

His eyes widened. "You're not even in the play!"

"You asked me to practice with you last week. So I took the script and practiced the scenes an hour each night. It was easy. It's only six scenes, Steven." She rolled her eyes, pushing down a blush as he started doing that weird, starry eyed stare again. "It's not that big of a deal."

"You spent seven hours memorizing lines," he said. "It is a big deal. That's nearly a work day."

She shrugged. "It came out of my nonproductive time. I would have just wasted it if I wasn't studying the script."

"You mean rest time?" he said. "Connie, you need that."

"You're one to talk, Mr. Forty-Extra-Curriculars," Connie retorted with a giggle. She saw the concern on his face and used both of her hands to cover it up. "Nooooo! Steven! Stop worrying! This is supposed to be fun! Cheesy romantic script! This has got to be one of your favorite things in the world, right?"

He pulled her hands down, starting to smile again. "Maybe."

"Definitely. Obviously," she said. Connie gave his hands a squeeze. "So, let's have fun. I'll do my best and you can be as dramatic as you want. A true thespian. You'll love it."

He did love it. Steven wasn’t likely to get a job as a bigshot Kansas actor anytime soon, but he put his heart into the role with enough enthusiasm and sincerity that his less convincing moments were easy to overlook. She shouldn’t have been surprised - Steven wasn’t a great liar, and that was half of acting. He made up for that by picking a role that matched his way of speaking, his general personality.

He especially hammed it up with the romance.

"When I couldn't make it to the train station, I sent a letter to your apartment. Didn't you get it?" Steven asked, stepping forward to take her hands in his.

Connie bit back nervous giggles at the intensity of it, every word and line of his face dripping with romantic sincerity. He had clearly been holding back in the anger scenes previously, but romance was his place to shine. Her mind tripped over the words she had so carefully memorized, but she found her place. She tried to be as sincere as he was, though she doubted she could pull off love sick or heartbroken without any experience. "No. My father took all the mail before I could see it. I always hoped, but I never knew. Not until now. You really wanted to see me?"

"Of course I did," he said with a gentle smile.

Connie's eyes went wide as Steven stepped closer, his warm, solid body flush against hers. Her heart started to pound in her chest as his fingers gently pushed the hair back from her face, dexterous fingers teasing the strands into place and dancing across the sensitive skin of her temple. His other hand cupped her jawline softly, his thumb smoothing over her cheek as he stared down at her - lovingly, adoringly, romantically. He wasn't supposed to look at her like that. No one looked at her like that.

"Don't you know I'm in love with you?" he murmured. "I've always been in love with you."

Connie was shaking. He must have noticed she was shaking. He slid her glasses up to her forehead, and she was baffled for a moment as to why, before his face came closer. She couldn't breathe. She shook down to her fingers and toes, heart racing, pounding against her constricted chest. She didn't understand it, not any of it, and part of her thought that she needed to say something right now before something happened.

Then gentle lips pressed against hers, warm and soft, and everything was a fuzzy, tingling bliss. She had no idea what to do, but she wanted to touch him. They had always touched so much. Her hands braced against his chest, and Steven took that as a cue to wrap his arms around her. In her startled gasp, he deepened the kiss, pressing firmly until she was nothing but shaking muscles, scattered thoughts, and a slowly building yearning for more and more.

He pulled back, and she felt herself following until the very last moment, leaning completely against him. She blinked her eyes open slowly, looking at his tender, loving face. There was a line she was supposed to have. It wasn't in her head. "I didn't think you were actually going to kiss me, Steven."

His sleepy gaze went a bit more alert. "What? But... It was in the script."

"I think people usually just say they kiss when they do this kind of thing." She felt a smile growing on her face as he looked more surprised, more confused. "I can't believe that was my first kiss."

Well, that was the wrong thing to say. Steven nearly shrieked with horror, leaping back with a yelp. "Connie! Oh my gosh, Connie, I'm so sorry! I never would have... I should have asked! Oh, geez. I'm just the worst!"

She laughed, oddly light and buzzy, like the night she had snuck a couple glasses of wine from her parent's liquor cabinet. "No, no, it's fine. Most people have their first kisses in middle school, I think. High school at least. I'm just a late bloomer. Better to get it out of the way, right?"

He frowned, holding his own hands tight. "First kisses should be special."

"It was!" Connie insisted, worrying as the guilt crept into his voice. "It's a funny story! And getting my first kiss from my best friend is a lot nicer than getting it from some jerk I'll never see again. Really, Steven! It's okay!"

And then. And then, because Connie was the stupidest girl in the world (and not because every part of her was buzzing, starting to ache from the absence of his touch, her mind focused on the feel of his mouth against hers) she laughed and said, "You can kiss me as much as you want! We've got to get the scene right!"

"Oh, I mean, if you're sure," he said uncertainly, slowly stepping back. "I think I could really put a lot more passion into it."

The laugh that came out of her belonged to a completely different Connie, a Connie who was not screaming inside about how she was the stupidest girl in the world. Instead, Connie laughed like this was just fine and not weird at all. "Sure! I'll try my best. I'm pretty new to this, you know."

"I'll teach you." He beamed.

She was going to die.

The next run, he told her to try to get into it a little more ( _she was going to kill him_ ) and encouraged her to move with him. He said all this with his warm chest pressed against hers, his arms draped around her shoulders, their faces inches apart. “You want to press back up against me, like you really want to kiss me. And then you just sort of figure out the tongue stuff as you go, I guess.”

Connie laughed and hoped she didn’t sound crazy. The odds were slim. “Do they normally kiss with tongue on stage?”

“That’s how I learned to kiss,” Steven said with a thoughtful look. “I don’t know why they wouldn’t do it that way. Acting is all about being as real as possible, right? So you’ve got to kiss someone the way you’d actually kiss them if you were in love.”

There was no way that was true. Connie was fairly certain the intricacies of what two actors’ tongues were doing on stage would be lost in an auditorium. She was quite sure that stage kissing, much like stage fighting, was a different skill from making out with a romantic partner. She was sure that the way to kiss on stage would be over the top, dramatic movements and flair closer to dancing than kissing.

But Steven was offering free kissing lessons, and Connie has never been kissed prior to this moment, and she was hardly going to let an opportunity like that slip by. So she nodded, and he kissed her again, and she did her best to not swoon and sigh in his arms like a damsel out of a fairy tale. She tried to be more enthusiastic about it, pushing more firmly against him, enjoying the softness of his body contrasted against the immovable wall of muscle beneath. _Almost magically unmovable,_ thought a distant part of her mind, which was hushed as Steven put his tongue into her mouth, along with any other coherent thoughts (aside from a very uncertain, _this seems unsanitary_ ).

He had said to figure out the tongue stuff and act like she really wanted to kiss him, so she shoved her tongue into his mouth, which made him giggle, and made her flush as she realized she was a forceful barbarian brute, ill-equipped to ever be anyone’s kissing partner. She winced, trying to step back, but his arms had slipped down to lock around her waist. “Uh, sorry. I said that I’ve never kissed before, right?”

“No, it’s okay. I shouldn’t have laughed,” he said, even though he was still grinning. “I did the same thing the first time I kissed Antonio. Tongue shoving is kind of a situational thing. Most kissing is a lot more… soft? Gentle?”

She bit her lip. “Not words people typically use for me.”

“You’re doing great!” he said warmly. “You’re not even in the play. You just have to kind of match me, you know? Just followed my lead so I can practice.”

She said some kind of agreement, and then Steven was kissing her. Again and again and again. He kissed her as he leaned against her desk, tugging her against him as his mouth languidly moved against hers. He kissed her against the wall, pressing against her with intensity so that she could barely breathe, an almost angry kiss with a few demonstrations of how one could properly utilize shoving a tongue in someone else’s mouth. And when her knees were weak, he didn’t notice, because he decided to try holding her up. Her legs were wrapped around his waist as he kissed her all romantic and frantic across her face and neck.

He was brushing his hands through her hair when her glasses, long ago pushed up, snagged and pulled. She hissed, the spell broken as she untangled herself from him, and tried to get herself back into proper order. No more ruffled clothes. No more heavy breathing. Glasses back on…

Glasses off? Glasses on. Glasses off. Glasses on.

One of those left the world blurry, and it was the wrong one.

Steven was rambling about something, smiling and laughing, which slowly dried up as Connie stared at him, wobbling her glasses up and down over her eyes, her glaring eyes. She tugged the glasses off her face, gazing at him with all the intensity she could muster, and pushed her thumbs against the lenses, each one falling into the carpet with a quiet thump. She put the empty frame back on her face and said coolly, “So, are we going to talk about the magic thing?”

He laughed, that awkward terrible one he used when he was trying to brush something aside. “Can we do the last scene ag-?”

“Seduction won’t get you out of this, Steven.” Her finger jabbed him in the chest as he flushed, repeating the word ‘seduction’ as if he had no idea what he was doing. She waved her hand in front of her face. “I can see! No one would believe that your strength is outside the realm of human possibility. I can never catch a video of you floating, though I _know_ I’ve seen your feet hover off the ground. I was _sure_ I’ve seen you heal yourself! Heal other people! But you can’t argue this, Steven. I can _see_.”

He swallowed. “Maybe it’s a miracle? Caused by your first kiss?”

She crossed her arms. “Confess or I’m going to go touch a hot stove.”

Steven yelped and stumbled back. “Don’t do that!”

“Why not?” She raised an eyebrow. “You can fix it, right?”

“That doesn’t mean you should hurt yourself!” he shouted. Both hands clapped over his mouth, and Connie really felt no satisfaction in besting him. He really was an awful liar. Steven cautiously crept closer, until his hands rested on her shoulders. “Okay, you figured it out. But you can’t tell anyone.”

“Of course I won’t tell anyone!” Connie snapped. “What kind of person do you take me for?”

“Well, you’re all mad-” he started.

“Because you’re _lying to me_ ! Really badly!” She shoved his hands off. “When it was just you stuff that’s fine. Oh, you want to hide the fact that it’s weird that you can lift an entire pyramid of cheerleaders? _Fine_ . You want to lie about the fact that you’ve obviously got some space stuff going on? _Fine!_ What you do in your private life doesn’t have to be any of my business.”

He shook his head. “So why are you-?”

“Because if you do something _to me_ and then try to make me think it’s _not real_ , that’s not protecting your secret, Steven! That’s you, bringing me into your world, and then trying to gaslight me out of it!” she shouted. “I don’t know how you heal people. I don’t know if this is a new thing or what, but you don’t get to lie to me about what’s happened to _me_ . You don’t get to involve me just so you can shove me out! It’s _mean_ , Steven! You can’t do that to someone.”

She had never yelled at him before. They had never fought before. Even now, there wasn’t a single insult she could find on her tongue to throw at him. She wouldn’t want to say it even if she could find one. She didn’t want to hurt him at all. Connie wanted him to know that she was hurt, that she was confused, that what he was doing wasn’t fair, so that he could be the good person she knew he was and fix it. Or they could fix it together.

Steven watched her shout, then closed his eyes. His hand came over his belly, clutching his shirt in that now familiar gesture that told her he was upset and scared. Quietly, he said, “Okay. I healed your eyes. I have magic spit.” He took a deep breath, and slowly pulled up his shirt, revealing his gem. “This is a pink diamond, from a magic alien race, and it means I’m some kind of super powered gem princess, except I dismantled the empire so it doesn’t anymore.”

She took his hand, gently tugging him to the bed, and they sat beside each other in her quiet room. Connie slowly laid her head on his shoulder. She slowly held out her glasses. “These are a pair of empty frames, and it means my world just got a whole lot better, except I have to explain this to my optometrist so that’s going to be a bitch.”

He laughed at her shocking swear, turning his head away to giggle. “Oh my gosh. I’m sorry.”

“I’m going to tell him some kid in physics pointed a high powered laser into my eyes,” Connie said, after some thought.

“That’s so dumb,” he said.

“A normal coffee for a normal boy!” she shouted suddenly, and the two of them couldn’t be serious about anything for the rest of the day.


End file.
